At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [73]
She held out her hand, which he took in anticipation of guiding her to her feet. But instead she kept his hand in hers and he felt her searching through the kid of her glove the calluses of his fingers. “Let us dismiss your embarras with the English. A small clarification is all that is required. How the English, to traduce your grandfather’s memory, concocted the charges against you. You will find society only too willing for so happy an éclaircissement. The world of affairs awaits you, my boy. I intend you shall enter it and prosper.”
“I was not aware you had any intentions for me.”
“We shall begin with the garden fête. Don’t glower so, Anthony dear. You know perfectly well one cannot have one’s nephew staying without an announcement. It would not do.”
“Would not do for whom?”
“For a MacMurrough. Whatever has happened, we are still MacMurroughs, and I will not have you shut in your room the day or flâneuring along to the Forty Foot. The garden fête will mark your return. I shall invite all the leading families. The nationalist ones, naturally. They will see a bright likely young man leading local youth in patriotic song and everyone shall be charmed. For you are a charming boy when you wish to be. You have élan, you have éclat, you have breeding. And you shall marry.”
“Marriage now?”
“Of course you shall marry. Did you think I would allow our name to die on account of some foolishness in London? I have never heard such a thing.”
She was in earnest but he could not bring himself to take seriously her designs. “Why stop at a garden féte? Why not an advertisement in the Irish Times?”
“I do not follow.”
“I might telephone to them myself. Anthony MacMurrough, surviving son of Sir John MacMurrough, and grandson of the late regretted Dermot James William MacMurrough, QC, MP, so forth and so fifth, has returned from His Majesty’s Wandsworth where lately he served two years’ hard for gross indecency with a chauffeur-mechanic. July Jamboree in Glasthule. Apply Ballygihen House.”
He said this looking her in the face, while her face hardened, but he looked away after and it was from her voice he learnt how deeply he disappointed his aunt.
“Yes, they have coarsened you. They have made—I mean the English have made—a braggart of my nephew. No doubt you believe I interfere. But you are fortunate to have anyone take an interest at all.”
“I should survive without you, Aunt Eva.”
“Yes, you would,” she agreed, “if only to spite us.” She stood up, a deliberate lean upon her parasol. “You hold yourself a very proud young man. But I see no pride, only a wallowing in fanfaronade. One day I wish you may have something to be proud of.” Her elbow angled, expectant of his arm. “I am afraid this chamaillerie has quite exhausted my humor. You may walk me to the house.”
He took her arm but held it stiffly. Contretemps, embarras, chamaillerie. The worst crime in the calendar he could live with. Foolishness was too unkind.
“As it happens, I do not flâneur nor shut myself in. I have my work.”
“Yes, a book that you write.”
“I am preparing a manuscript for publication.”
“Some unfortunate you took pity on when you were”—her fingers waved—“indisposé.”
“He took pity on me, actually.”
“And in return you undertake the publication of his—what is it?”
“It is a scholarly work, Aunt Eva, whose subject is the nature of nature.”
“No less.”
“De natura naturae. It was Scrotes’s life’s work.”
“Scrotes being the author of this exercise.”
“Dr. Scrotes, in fact.”
“Indeed. And how did Dr. Scrotes come to find himself in your”—again the waving fingers—“bonne compagnie?